10 vegetables starting with the letter R — each with origin, classification, and notes.
If you've been searching for vegetables that start with R, you'll find 10 detailed vegetables below. We're not interested in giving you only a list of names — every entry on this page links to a full profile with the kind of detail you'd actually want to know.
For vegetables, that means scientific name, family, plant part, season, nutrition, and cooking uses.
A bitter Italian red-leafed chicory eaten in salads, grilled, or roasted — northern Italy's prized winter vegetable, with several distinctive regional varieties protected under European DOP designation.
A small, crisp, peppery root vegetable in the brassica family, eaten raw with salt and butter, sliced into salads, or roasted to mellow its bite.
A wild garlic-onion forest vegetable native to eastern North America — a brief spring season, intense aromatic flavor, and a passionate Appalachian foraging tradition that's gone viral with chef-driven demand.
A bitter Italian leafy green with small broccoli-like florets (also called broccoli rabe) — a defining ingredient of southern Italian cuisine, Italian-American sausage sandwiches, and Mediterranean winter cooking.
A loose-leaf lettuce variety with deep red-purple leaf tips — used widely in mixed salads, sandwich layers, and decorative plates for its visual contrast against green lettuces.
A small olive-green Indian Himalayan bean — once a major food crop in the Eastern Himalayas, now a "lost crop" being revived for its drought-resilience and unique nutritional profile.
The mathematically perfect vegetable — romanesco broccoli (or Roman cauliflower) forms a head of tightly packed, spiralling chartreuse-green florets that arrange themselves in a precise Fibonacci spiral; each smaller cone is a perfect miniature of the whole, making the vegetable a textbook example of a natural fractal; milder and nuttier in flavour than broccoli or cauliflower, it has become a favourite of chefs for its visual impact.
A pine-scented woody Mediterranean shrub that's beloved in roast meats, breads, and Mediterranean grilling — extraordinarily long-lived and traditionally associated with remembrance.
A long-podded climbing bean from the Mexican highlands — grown across British and Eastern European gardens for its prolific harvest, eaten as fresh long pods rather than dried beans.
A large yellow-fleshed Scandinavian root vegetable — a hybrid of cabbage and turnip, known as "swede" in Britain and central to Scandinavian, British, and Nordic-influenced cooking.
That's our current list of vegetables starting with the letter R. We add new entries every week — if you have a favorite vegetable starting with R that isn't on this page, let us know and we'll write it up.
Looking for more? Try vegetables that end with R, or contain R anywhere in the name.